Thursday, April 20, 2006

The mystery interview is done, and waiting on some paperwork to be submitted. I'm hoping to see it online at the O'Reilly Network fairly soon.

Just to the end the mystery, I've interviewed Zed Shaw. He's the creator of Mongrel (but you already knew that). He's also got some important things to say about programming, Ruby, Rails, and Mongrel.

A couple of things didn't make it into the interview, so I thought I'd share them here:

The thing I'm most impressed with is how David H. Hansson has finally seen the light and has accepted HTTP as more than just a means of shuttling data. When I first started working on Mongrel he frequently asked what was wrong with FastCGI, since it worked just fine. Since seeing his presentation at Canada on Rails--which focused a lot on how useful HTTP was--I think he's finally embraced the "Just Use HTTP" religion. I'm not sure if it's true, but I'd like to think Mongrel had a part in his conversion.

The majority of questions I got from folks seemed to be serious queries about deployment issues indirectly related to Mongrel, or just complete misunderstandings. My favorite misunderstanding was when Floyd Marinescu from The Server Side asked me about Mongrel then said, "Web server? Isn't that a solved problem?" Kind of frightening that the guy is going to start a TSS for Ruby and has so little understanding of the community's issues.

. . .

In general I think Mongrel is well loved, and that it's really working great for people. I also think that most folks are just now seriously basing their systems on it and the next few months will be when I start to get more feedback about how well it works for them in production. I've been forging ahead of them in my own work with Mongrel so I'm confident they'll have few problems that can't be solved (yet again)